Paula Kelly

[GlenelG]

Paula Kelly
Born: October 21, 1943 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446780/

[Sam Spade]

A few more images of Paula.

[St_Francis]

From the July 1972 "Two Much" pictorial. These photos really got my heart racing as a youngster.

[Apsara]

[St_Francis]

Historical footnote: In the photos at the top of this thread, Paula became the first woman to show bush in the bunny magazine. Liv Lindeland was the first PM to do so but Paula was first, period.

[Fabrizio]

[Apsara]

: historical as, allegedly, being the very first model displaying some frontal nudity in the yet prudish PB.

[COP11]

[womwam]

1968

1969 - Sweet Charity

1969 - Academy Awards


1975 & '76 - Police Woman


Gallery

[Findcandor]

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TOP OF THE HEAP


Paula Kelly was a helluva multi-talented lady. What will intrigue most at Vintage Erotica Forum, besides her artistic capabilities (dramatic acting, comedic acting, singing, dancing, choreographing... the works, and all at a top quality level), is that this was a woman who possessed that inner fire. Paula Kelly was an affirmer of life. (I say "was" with a broken heart, because as it turns out, she died in 2020 of chronic lung disease at the age of seventy-seven.)


Paula's with Richard Pryor in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986). In the second
photo, credited to Chris Hoffmann, she is at a reception of the Berliner Bürgermsiters
at the Hilton Hotel, as she attended the Berlin Film Festival, conversing in this photo (dated
June 23, 1972) with a producer named M. Salomon at left, and Federal Foreign Minister
Walter Scheel.

Let me first 'splain what I'm doing here. I prepared this post for the "American Actresses ~ Vintage" thread, which necessitated digging up the above-average science-fiction film, Soylent Green (1973); there was a scene with Paula's interaction with the film's star (Charlton Heston), leading me to discover this thread devoted to Paula, begun in 2009 by now-gone Member "GlenelG," and since that time it hasn't filled out even a page. I decided to snip frames of Paula from this film, especially since she was dressed in a top that was teasingly open.


Paula Kelly was in Uptown Saturday Night (1974), seen above with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier; also in the
film were Harry Belafonte and Richard Pryor. She does a great comic turn as Leggy Peggy, a congressman's wife
whom the buddies ran into in an illegal gambling joint.

Now the actress who led me here would be described by many as genuinely beautiful. There are those who would also describe the highly attractive Paula Kelly as "beautiful," but I would argue not in the classical sense. Would the other actress qualify as being wild in bed? Not easy to say, unless she's taken for a test drive. (And you know the "ice princess" stereotype for very beautiful women.) On the other hand, a test drive would not have been necessary for Paula. You just know she had it in her to be hard-core carnal.


Paula Kelly played a public defender (for which she may have received an Emmy
Award) in the hit TV show, Night Court; she appeared in twelve episodes in 1984.

The craziest Twilight-Zonish thing just happened, as I was writing. I needed to go to Paula's IMDb page to check her life/death details referred to in the foregoing, and that site has an "identifying video" on some actors' pages which plays automatically. I wasn't paying attention to the video, but then suddenly an actress from that particular film appeared, and... she was the "beautiful" one from my other post!



Now what were the odds of that? Evidently, the "beautiful" one, named Beverly Gill, who had a limited film and TV resumé, appeared in another film with Paula, besides Soylent Green (and also in the same year of 1973), The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The "Spook" is the "token Negro" (as worded by the trailer's narrator) hired by the CIA, who gets taught their dirty tricks (and trained to be their "best... spy since double-oh seven," as Beverly Gill's character states), and then he leaves the agency to turn "gangs of ghetto kids into a highly trained guerilla army," to sock it to whitey! As the trailer, which you may want to watch (because it's a blast), has the central character say it, "This is not about 'Hate White Folks"; it's about loving freedom enough to die or kill for it if necessary." (Paula plays a prostitute and love interest for the hero.)

My incentive to prepare this post grew once I laid eyes on this:

Originally Posted by GlenelG

Paula Kelly

Paula appeared twice in PLAYBOY, second time in
1972, and this was her first time in 1969. The
historical significance of this issue, as Member
"St_Francis" explained in his Post #5 from
2010: "Paula became the first woman to show
bush in the bunny magazine. Liv Lindeland was
the first PM to do so but Paula was first, period."
.

Why, that is a very famous photo! The actress I accidentally stumbled upon to put up a post for was behind that photo?? Now I had to definitely do the post, and with even greater respect. As you'll see, if you just look up above, Blocked! Member "Apsara" put up the same image (split into two, as it was a larger version) in Post #7, with two other pages from the article. The second page contained text, which I've transcribed for easy reading, so that we may get a better feel for the woman:

SENSUOUSLY STRUCTURED Paula Kelly promises to be among Hollywood's most memorable new faces and figures of 1969. Her first film role—as Sweet Charity's tough talking taxi dancer Helene—gave optimum exposure to Paula's bumptious dancing and comedic talents. Though she's anxious to become a dramatic actress—especially after receiving gilt-edged notices in the ill-fated Broadway production The Dozens last March—Paula's sticking with song and dance for the moment. Currently, she's starring in the national road show production of the hip musical Your Own Thing. As video viewers who watched her saucy dance interpretation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at April's Academy Awards presentations can testify, Paula does her own thing very well, indeed.


From the Playboy shoot.

Paula (left) was chosen for her role on Sweet Charity when Bob Fosse, the film's director, saw her perform in the London production of the hit musical. "Before I signed to do the show in England. I had also played the role of Helene for six months in Las Vegas," says Paula. "As badly as I wanted to be in the film," she remembers, "I admit to being scared to death when the call finally came for me. Below Chita Rivera, Shirley Maclaine and Paula whoop it up in a scene from the film. Bottom: Shooting exclusively for PLAYBOY, photographer Larry Schiller employs a series of strobe exposures... to capture Paula at her most captivating.

(Playboy employed such professional writers; it was a magazine of unusually high quality. Too bad societal mores transformed it into "pornography" during and after the 1980s.)


Let me get my shots of Soylent Green out of the way, first:








In 2010, Apsara also put up the pages for Paula's second Playboy appearance (again, from 1972), performing a valuable service. Of course, we are all primarily interested in the nude form of the women who are explored on Vintage Erotica Forum, and all that has appeared on this thread so far were her photos from the magazine. The article's third page with text provided a powerful clue that there was more Paula nudity. First, let's transcribe that page for easy reading, also in the effort to learn more about the lady:

WHEN SHE first appeared in PLAYBOY back in August 1969, Paula Kelly was singing and dancing in the national road-show production of a hip musical, Your Own Thing. She had also just completed her maiden film. Sweet Charity, in which she recreated her award-winning stage role as a hard-boiled taxi dancer. Paula told us then that she'd like to do more acting and less hoofing—a wish that appears to be coming true. To her dramatic credits—which include TV's Medical Center and The Young Lawyers, plus Hollywood's version of The Andromeda Strain—she now adds Top of the Heap, written, produced and directed by Christopher St. John, who played a militant Harlem leader in Shaft. Paula is cast as a nightclub performer who's being kept by St. John. Although it's primarily a dramatic role, she's also called upon to display her considerable talents as a singer. New York-raised. Paula majored in voice at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art and switched to dance at Julliard School of Music. An invitation to perform at the 1969 Academy Awards led to a saucy—and show-stealing—interpretation of Chitty Chitty Bang Rang; subsequent TV gigs included the Dean Martin and Carol Burnett shows, and specials by Soupy Sales and Sammy Davis Jr. One day soon they may all be looking for spots on the Paula Kelly show.

....
That sounds like a great production Paula was behind at the 1969 Academy Awards;
Barbra Streisand and Diahann Carroll were in attendance. Third shot of Paula was one
of three put up by Member "Womwam," from the post directly above, as she appeared
on the telecast.

The second blurb explained what the film was about:



Top of the Heap takes a hard look at the frustrations of a black cop, played by author-director Christopher St. John, whose brother in real life is a cop. St. John's character fails to communicate with his wife and kids, with his white patrol-car partner, with the owner of the club at which Paula works and with just about everyone he encounters in the line of duty, from dope dealers to hard-hats and demonstrators, bus drivers and troublesome passengers. His outlets are Paula (above right), the violence he deals out daily—professionally and otherwise—and his dreams, in which he fancies himself both a warrior in an African jungle and the first black to walk on the moon. (One of his dreams was a fantasy with a beautiful blond nurse, played by Ingeborg Sørensen, which led to this post.)



The photo on that page showed Ms. Kelly's pubic hair, but that turned out to be a promo picture prepared just for the magazines. I made sure to dig up the film, and she was just wonderful; such a free-spirited force of nature. (That may have been her character, but it seemed to be no leap to imagine this is the way she was.) Here we go:












Interestingly, this frantic jump-cutting love-making sequence avoided the rear views.










Paula at the Emmy Awards on September 17, 1989:

......

In the second shot, she is at the Jimmie Awards on March 19, 1990. Lastly, she is seen at the Jimmie Awards with Richard Roundtree and her only husband, British film director Don Chaffey (the one behind 1963's classic Jason and the Argonauts). He would die eight months after this event, and they were wed for only five years. When they got married in 1985, he was sixty-eight, and she was forty-three. (By the way, I couldn't figure out what the "Jimmie Awards" were; there are the Jimmy Awards, or the National High School Musical Theatre Awards, but first established in 2009, almost two decades after what the photos represent. The "Jimmie" Awards were somehow connected to the Association of Asian/Pacific American Artists.)




With the host of the musical variety TV show This Is Tom Jones; Paula was in the episode airing on Jan. 1, 1970.




A satellite carrying deadly bacteria wipes out a a town's inhabitants save for a man and a baby; Paula plays the associate of James Olson, one of four scientists assigned to find a way out, in The Andromeda Strain (1971).




Lino Ventura, playing a priest, is seen in first shot restraining his partner (in their quest to take on gangsters), ex-cop Isaac Hayes, from harming Paula Kelly (as a scared hooker), in Three Tough Guys (A.K.A. Tough Guys, 1974). In the second shot, Fred Williamson prepares to murder Paula after having taken out Isaac Hayes.




Robert Hooks is Shaft-like cool cat "Mister T" who confronts crime bosses, and Paula is a lounge singer and his lady, in Trouble Man (1972), featuring music by Marvin Gaye.




The scene of Paula Kelly, Shirley MacLaine and Chita Rivera dancing in "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This" from Sweet Charity was also featured in MGM's tribute to dance movies, That's Dancing! (1985). This Washington Post obituary for the actress explained that Bob Fosse's 1969 film of Sweet Charity was loosely inspired by Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria, and aside from the spectacular rooftop dancing scene accompanying "There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This," the other big number was "Big Spender," regarding the ladies' clients. About Paula's performance, filmmaker Lee Daniels wrote in a 2016 Time magazine article: "Never in my life had I seen such elegance, raw talent and breath taking honesty on screen... She is an unsung hero."



Another excerpt from that Washington Post obituary that rang true for me:

“There was always this sort of élan about her dancing and her performance,” said her friend Ken Page, who acted alongside Ms. Kelly on the television series “South Central.” “Everything she did, including her stint in ‘Sophisticated Ladies,’ was like Josephine Baker come back to life. . . . To me she always had this inborn elegance. Some people strive for it, some people paint it on, but she really had it.”














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